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Designing the ideal dairy cow for 2050

Dairy farmers are being asked about the scale of their farms, their skills and systems in a national welfare survey

Rose Grant

The term 'designer baby' is often used pejoratively to describe babies selected using genetic screening for desirable traits like sex, athletic ability, or intelligence.

In the dairy industry selective breeding is par for the course, and it's going further than ever before.

"There are over 40 different traits that we currently produce breeding values for," Sarah Saxton says.

"They include your production traits and longevity and fertility and all those sorts of things.

"There are other traits that we don't even have breeding values yet for."

Sarah Saxton is an extension officer with the Australian Dairy Herd Improvement Scheme (ADHIS) and has just started asking dairy farmers what sort of cow they want for 2050, or into the future.

The ADHIS is reviewing the national breeding objectives for cows, with the first of 25 on-farm discussions held today in Tasmania. The series of discussions have been dubbed 'Australia's longest farm walk'.

Sarah Saxton says she's asking farmers directly to design of the next generation of dairy cows.

"Not just looking at the end dollar value, but the personal value and the 'stress value' of those traits.

"A lot of production traits are currently covered in the APR or Australian Profit Ranking.

"That's really designed to optimise profit for the Australian dairy farmer.

"But there are other traits that aren't included in the index.

"And we'll be interested to hear from farmers about what future traits they're looking to breed for in the future.

"A really good example that's had a lot of R&D into it recently is feed conversion efficiency.

"There's actually a breeding value in the pipeline for that.

"Some other traits further on the horizon that might be of interest are metabolic diseases like acidosis and ketosis, and things like that.

"But we're open to suggestions.

"If there's a trait we haven't thought of, we want to hear from farmers about it."